So Karen, Why Did it Take You So Long to Finish Book Three?

Because
it’s always three o’clock? Sartre wrote
in La Nauséethat “Three
o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.” OK, he wrote it in French, but the point
still stands. Middle age is like that
for me. Too late for writing with the
crazed energy that possesses you like a comfortably cloying demon when you first
fall in love with words and what they can do.
Too early to withdraw from society and live once again like an annoying young
word drunk.

The problem with middle age is that
you never feel present for anything that matters. The other problem is how easy it is to hide
your Romantic, epic fantasy sensibilities because they’ve become disfigured by
a society that doesn’t brook such nonsense.
Blogging about serious issues like the corporate-sponsored war on the
humanities is tolerated, but please leave the wizard stuff alone. (As if there’s a difference beyond
presentation.)

Also, the culture has developed an
unhealthy fetish for all things evidence-based along with a bizarre discomfort
around examining what any given piece of evidence does or doesn’t show. Which means it takes more energy to maintain
the necessary headspace to continue writing about a fantasy world whose rules I
get to make up as I go along.

Also, I failed to take my own advice
concerning the best jobs for writers being the kind you can compartmentalize,
because that allows you to compartmentalize your writing time, which allows you
to have writing time. Running a law practice is not one of those
jobs. Much as I enjoyed the practice of
law, and much as I learned from my clients, I feel like my legal adventure has
run its natural course and I now have the time to return to fiction writing.

Getting back to writing a cool,
philosophical, bad-ass but vulnerable anti-hero also takes more energy in
mid-life, because consensus reality is a constant nag, and its boosters are
zealous in its enforcement. So magic,
mysticism, and fictional world-building is something you don’t discuss in
polite society, unless you have a strong stomach. It makes you guarded, which doesn’t
help. You compartmentalize your
imagination. Then, over time, you forget
where you left the key.

But finish Book Three I did.

It’s
full of magic and wizard battles and plot twists and new characters and
old. Llewelyn is back. He’s older, more cynical, and maybe even more
world-weary than in the previous books.
But that just gives him more interesting issues on which to comment.

It
is a shorter work than the first two books, but that is intentional. Thematically, it is meant to function as an
epilogue, and no epilogue is longer than its mother text. At the end of Hecate’s Glory Llewelyn finishes his story to Walworth. The
King’s Glory focuses on how the stories we tell about ourselves and about each
other impact everything that does matter: the world, magic, our understanding
of good and evil, impossibly fraught choices, who we are, and who we want to be. In that sense, it is a final word on
Llewelyn’s trial testimony. Without
being too meta – I hope.

Anyway,
as Isulde says to Llewelyn in the first chapter, as he’s trying to make sense
of the end of his trial, “Welcome back to the world you know.”

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Why We Read Strangers

But if the writing doesn’t matter to the writer solely for its own sake, without hope of external validation, then it doesn’t matter.

If you can’t write for yourself, if you can’t write for those shadows creeping along a silent wall and measuring out your time on this earth in increments of everything else you could be doing, if you can’t write while knowing you are destroying your time on a beautiful madness that nobody will ever validate and many will mock – then please don’t call yourself a writer. Real writing isn’t for sissies. It’s more than putting words on the page. It’s denying everything else to be able to put those words on the page while knowing that the mess of language you’ve created is all you’ll ever get out of it.